


ferrygirls

by transversely



Category: Mugen no Juunin | Blade of the Immortal
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 07:32:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5325881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Your committment to reprobacy is presumably fearsome! I'm sure I certainly quail to the soles of my very maidenly and now quite orphaned feet."</p>
            </blockquote>





	ferrygirls

**Author's Note:**

> ryo-lives postcanon wishful thinking v. much inspired by [this glorious post](http://argei.tumblr.com/post/113479444474/transversely-replied-to-your-post) and attempting to rectify the unforgivable travesty that is a BoTI without these two holy terrors bossily elbowing their way into one another's livelihoods, personal business, pants, living rooms, generalized grieving-adjacent endeavors, etc. 
> 
> this work contains manga spoilers to the end as well as mentions of character deaths up to that point and canon-typical violence. 
> 
> enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

When Ryo woke up in the cart bound for Edo, she threw a stick at the girl, this being the last weapon available to her and easily grasped without a thumb. The knob of her wrist followed it, and then her elbow, and then her shoulder, all the bones pulled along like a drawstring until she'd hitched across the cartbed and collapsed into a heap that knocked the wheels crosseyed over a rut. "Good grief," said the blonde driver.

"You are under arrest by order of the bakufu!" shouted Ryo. "Though I extend a commendation for the murder of Anotsu Kagehisa, who was an enemy of the state, though not so flagrantly as you!" She excused herself for a moment to cough up some blood over the side of the cart. "Are you _certain_ you are the miscreant known as Asano--excuse me! Excuse me!"

The girl peered down at her sorrowfully, having most unceremoniously shoved Ryo's face into her lap, trying to induce her to lie down. She was unfurling a blanket with what surely must have been her criminal stealth. Her thumb stroked up and down the side of Ryo's shoulder, tracing a fretful little mandala of goosebumps.

Ryo twisted around and leveled her an incensed look to restore propriety. The cart smelled of iron, snow, and enamel-sheathed bronze, this last from an Ainu-made dagger quivering point down at the end of Ryo's robe to keep her anchored to the floor of the cart. Several dismayed jerks yielded no leverage.

"You are legally prohibited from _abducting_ me," she began. "Perhaps you didn't hear me? I'm _arresting_ you--"

"Knock her out with the knife and make her go to sleep," called the blonde lady, over her shoulder. "Baby Habaki, honey. It's okay. All friends here."

"She is hardly my friend, or--adjacent! She is a criminal!"

The girl made no attempt to contest this. She stared miserably over the side of the cart until Ryo jerked at the knife so hard her fingers, coated in blood, slipped free, and then when she stumbled the girl suddenly lurched bodily at her and trapped her in her blanket like a moth in a lantern, battering ineffectually at the wool until she had to stop, winded, and collapsed onto the cartbed.

The warmth of the blanket made it clear immediately that she'd been freezing--the entire afternoon, she'd been freezing. They'd stayed in Mito for a fortnight of recovery. On the ride there, Magatsu had situated her against his chest with a completeness that let her know him for whom she'd chosen, fitting himself closely to her pulse points as though warmth could be something he apportioned evenly to them both, or catch like a flame within firewood tenuously laid together at its match-tips, and now the Edo Castle criminal girl, the girl who had let her father--let him--dead in the snow, in the high wild wind of a port at the end of the frozen country; he would never be warm again. Now for the second time in a day, the second in her lifetime, she was being held in the same way, bloodwarm efficiency for her out of soup-bone gangly elbows, collarbones, ribs, the surprising softness of the girl's midriff when Ryo's fingers clenched on the blanket, the bone keys of her fingers, carding against her hair with an immediacy that shocked them both; she could see it in the girl's eyes when she looked up.

"Adjacent," the miscreant said, in wonder. "Do you know, that's the clearest it's been in years." Then she began to laugh. Ryo allowed it because it seemed like appropriate behavior, for a criminal. The blanket itched and her nose hurt. Asano Rin's own nose was bleeding when she ducked her head down, hitched with the ricochet of the cart. The knuckles Ryo couldn't help but feel on her fingers were chill as seaglass. They were both crying, their mouths open. Breaths gathering and dispersing like laughter into the dense, shell-shocked air.

 

 

 

  

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The snowfall at Mito looked to become a blizzard. The three of them crossed over into Edo city limits near midnight and had bowls of new year's ozoni stew in a flophouse while they decided what to do. Ryo couldn't remember the last time she had been to a flophouse, and then she realized she never had but had heard enough to craft a memory (adjacent). Hyakurin waited until they'd both drank down their broth in front of her to introduce herself. She talked to Rin while Ryo crowbarred apart her mochi, and then she talked to Ryo while Rin mashed hers into a formless smear. Periodically Ryo felt the need to remind them both that Rin was still arrested. "Going to prison," she explained, wiping her mouth, "because she destroyed Edo Castle, or part of it, and also a public garden, I would not want to forget this. I am happy to take her into custody after we finish eating."

"Well, there _is_ no prison right now," said Rin, looking apologetic, "on account of...well, the prison was in Edo Castle. Now that I think about it, it was certainly a strange scheme for a--"

"Excuse me, please do not insult the honorable shogun," said Ryo. "Is this your renegade nature? But I am more than willing to keep you under house arrest until you can be sequestered away for life. I certainly must go back to my house to prevent it from being snowed under." She looked at Hyakurin expectantly. Rin worried at the mush in her bowl so pointedly one of her chopsticks bent and twanged like a bow. 

"I'm really very grateful," said Rin, when they were outside, waiting on their cart for Hyakurin. Now awake, now bandaged and tidy, they sat as though on a bridge like ferrygirls at a crossing, dangling their legs, their bloodied robes parceled in their laps and two honeysticks apiece in their hands, a gift from the flophouse owner. The sticks were furred with sugar crystals and had a charred, molten, wonderful taste. "I'll certainly appreciate the hospitality right--at this moment."

"Well, you are my prisoner, you wouldn't reach a facility in the city until the snow clears. I wouldn't wish to obstruct justice."

The sky hung low, shivered, hammered-metal. The storm, bruise grey, moved and shone in its underbelly. In this type of weather her father wouldn't have visited anyway. Perhaps her mother would have contracted pneumonia now, instead of a month prior.

"Tell me something, who are you?" Rin asked with sudden, low force. She was staring at her feet. "Do you miss your home? How long have you been away?"

Ryo didn't answer, surveying the sky with its thickening tracery of clouds. She was already beginning to lose sensation in her feet. The last time she sat like this, her legs so childishly loose, the winter wind wet on the fingers-width of skin past her hairline, she was seven, her new obi was snug as a great snake about her ribcage, and she was waiting for the first of her haircuts from her father. Her hair had been heavy and twisted and didn't hold its shape when she let it down, but when cut it had, a lovely living coil now that it was free of her. She scrubbed her finger along the edge of the cart and thought about that, the lightness of severance, the shape of her smaller self, falling into her hands.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Between them they had enough mon for one person to stay at the flophouse, so they pressed it upon Hyakurin, who was with child. She gave them nine days, an allowance for waiting out the storm until the roads were cleared to travel to Rin's dojo in Edo city proper, and promised to send an errand runner before then. Ryo ignored all of this and explained with patience that should the snow continue she might also apply for a writ for them to die in her own hut of old age and that was another possibility of house arrest. It had already started snowing by the time they arrived at the hut outside the city limits, low lights of snow, here and there, delicately hung white lanterns. Rin went stiff and startled at the sight of the tiny house standing upright on a snowy rill between scintillations of trees.

Ryo took her inside and showed her the kettle hung in the center, the mat where she might sleep, a shoddy screen done with distended pink and salmon color persimmons that she had chosen as a child, out of the seventeen-mon rack at the joiner's, that from a distance had looked fatly contented like her little brother's face that she had seen once from great distance at his shichi-go-san. She'd buried a clay pot of pickles and bok choy under the ground before leaving and found it to be cold and untouched by foxes; she sorted rice, set the kettle to burning. She listened for the simmer and skitter of water against metal. She wet two fingers and turned them out into the whistling wind, measuring the likely lay of drifts.

The air was beginning to turn a chill, remote blue, as though burning, unfathomable, the flame-tip at the heart of a greater world. Beyond their stretch of sky cordoned by charcoal tree branches there might have been the warmer oranges and reds of winter evening, but here there was only the blue, and the silence.

When she turned Rin was staring at the walls, her face shaded by uneven planes of firelight.

"Do you know how to do anything?" Ryo asked, understanding.

A flush cracked across the eggshell cheekbones. "I _never_ ," said Rin, and then, " _Honestly_. Do you want--I'll burn our clothes. Please do give them to me."

"We'd better wash them instead. I have three robes, how many do you have?"

"Two..." This delivered queasily, a hand lifted to the back of the neck, the hair hanging heavy there, drawn out, caught on fingertips, and then dropped. Rin's hair had an insubstantiality to it; there were contours, it flattened, it rose, it waved. It held its shape in a way that was difficult to stop watching and to Ryo, who hadn't thought of her own until she'd felt those fingers in it, unsurprising that she was so conscious of it, the way it fell and how it lifted from that ruddy neck. "How funny--only two. Is this what I came back for."

There was no answer to this. "Then we'd _certainly_ better wash them. There is no need to burn them to get rid of the blood! We might--"

"I never said that."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I never said I wanted to burn them because of the blood."

"Well--" It was true; she hadn't. Ryo shifted her weight from one foot to another. Then she set her kettle down, knelt, and scooped up a catch of coals in her scuttle. "Let's melt the water! I mean the snow, ice. Whatever there is outside--we shall do it to the best of our ability, even if one of us is a malodorous prisoner--"

" _Malodorous!_ "

"--and the other is no one at all, not even an old--dried-up husk of forgotten rice!"

"I couldn't say whether I feel better or not," said Rin.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They had a reprieve from the snow's reach due to the threadbare canopy of trees, but bathed uniformly in that eerie blue light they shivered anyway as they shoveled snow into two pails. They skipped a little on the first fine skeins of flakes in their sandals, and cried out when the snow quickened or a tree branch dislodged its burden. They got back into the hut breathing hard, and their fire spluttered; they plunged their hands up to the wrists into the pails of icewater and both gasped at the bite.

"T-this was a terrible idea," said Rin, teeth chattering, "we should've waited until _after_ the storm. Just because you couldn't bear to have them here--"

"I am afraid you are delusional and I never said that!" said Ryo, as politely as she could. A terrible headache was building between her temples from the water; it'd started immediately. It might not have had anything to do with the water, or it might have been about something completely unrelated, but the water was there and her hands were in it, and the headache was there and her head was in it. There was nothing to be done.

Rin gave her a soft, cored look and then plunged her hands with startling resolve back into the bucket. They snatched the robes out of their bundles and unfolded them. The tang of iron filled the little hut immediately and they both turned their heads away trying not to gag, trying not to meet one another's eyes, aware, both of them, that they couldn't prop open the screen doors for the cold. The robe was heavy in her hands when she plunged it down into the water. She had to put all her weight behind it, as though mounting something and trying to drown it. She'd never done anything like that. Perhaps Rin had.

"Would you advise if you have ever drowned someone," she asked. "In your life. Perhaps in the course of your criminal endeavors?"

"Oh...no. Well, this man--" she gestured with her chin at her own robe, which she was only floating dismally in the water like a lotus petal. Her mouth made an unhappy moue. "This man was the first I _killed,_ with my own hands."

There seemed to be some consolation demanded by this statement. Ryo shoved harder at the billowing clouds of robes, that felt like flesh, nibbled by fish. Red was already splashing up against her knuckles, ebb and flow.

"I'm sure you did ruin many livelihoods," she said kindly, trying to be conscientious of that very sincere efficiency presumably turned to criminality, what it might want, or like to hear. "You did ruin my father's. Very good job of it."

Rin made a choked noise. "Well, I'm dreadfully sorry..."

"Oh, no, no...your committment to reprobacy is presumably fearsome! I'm sure I certainly quail to the soles of my very maidenly and now quite orphaned feet. Quail--" Ryo wrung out the robe and a shower of bloody water cascaded into her lap.

"It's kind of you...I wouldn't say fearsome, only, I do like everything just so..."

Rin was now stirring at the robe hopelessly with an extended index finger, peering at the blood running off into her palm. It splashed out onto Ryo's floor and without warning an image of her mother coughing up her lungs burned across her retinas.

She flung her hand up to cover her eyes. Her father's blood trickled down onto her cheeks, the salt of her lips. 

 "Shame on us!" she cried, and gagged again. "What ever makes it so unmanageable? Just because it is _slightly_ more than certain monthly standards--"

Rin made that choked noise once more, nearly laughing. "I'm certainly g-glad you said it. Shouldn't we be used to--"

A gust of wind smashed up against the side of the hut, sounding like a handful of thrown stones. They both screamed aloud and the bloody water sprang up again, the spray, the salt, so much like the sea of the coast. Ryo shut her eyes tight and then she felt bony fingers on her wrist, a desperate and sincere tug that jerked her off-balance. Rin pushed her a little in her rush to shove past her to her pail, and by the time Ryo had collected herself to trade places the headache had lessened, her vision had cleared from a misty red to the numbing, chill blue outside in the twilight.

When she touched Rin's robe in the water, bloody from a man she didn't know, she saw instantly that she'd forgotten anything to wash with. As she got up to fetch her washboard she saw that Rin had already taken a handful of the stones mixed in with the coal to put into her own bucket, to wash out her father's blood.

They worked quietly and well, now, pared down to the task of one another's burdens. They added lye, and a handful of clean gravel to work loose the spatters. Midway through, as Ryo worked at a particularly stubborn stain, Rin said, in a low voice, "I can't bear it. Not for his death to be _disgusting,_ like anyone else's."

She hadn't demanded anything, after all; it was only Ryo who had heard it. The lye stung her fingertips like nettles, the cored wound where her missing thumb had been taking up the hurt and opening around it as though an iron rod. She worked her fingers down into the material, as far as they would go, feeling the exact weight and give of it, the tender fabric that had covered this other girl's heart when she'd been anointed like Ryo with the man's blood. What else compared? When she drew the robe out of the water and spread it on the rim of her bucket they both caught their breath again, as though with the cold, neither had expected it to come clean.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

In the latter half of the night she woke up with the wind screaming along a glasslike edge, the blizzard outside now shuddering and groaning in intensity, and thought with distant surprise about what she had forgotten. She felt something heavy and yet incorporeal pressing against the divot in her throat, the corners of her eyes, and her broken wrist that had been set, and now sent up serene, regular signal flares of pain.

In a kind of vertiginous horror she peeled herself from the floor and bolted to the door. There was a crash but she didn't stop to look at what had fallen. She seized her sword from the floor and went out shivering into the darkness. It whistled in a low downtone as she slipped it down into the iai stance.

The beating-wings cacophony of the snow swallowed up even the small sounds of her skin and breath. There was no opponent, nothing to push against to gauge her own ability to push, so that she understood she might go on untethered forever. She had returned and now there was to be nothing again but this silent, stillborn struggle with the herself for the remainder of her days. She might have already been dead, a yuki-onna or its victim like the old tales but these were the woods of her childhood that had never yielded anything but the prison-bars of trees, snowbanks that could entomb one alive, and a ghost would never know where to look. No matter how she wanted it. No matter how often those ghosts had walked the paths before.

Her vision blurred and she found she couldn't support the sword with her left hand. The sword guard she'd engineered had been lost in the scuffle and now the tang slid alarmingly in her fingers when she tried to fit her thumbless hand to it. Finally the sword dropped into the snow at her feet.

She put her hand to her cheek, and then her eyes, the heel of it wet. She tried to breathe a little louder, to feel for a moment that she was not alone. When she knelt to grope for her sword in the blind, feathered dark she felt a coating of powder over the pommel already, her fingertips so numb from the cold she felt it at first touch like dust.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Powder had accumulated to a handspan and a half the next day, thick as wool under a blue-grey sky. The air was all alive with the tumult of flakes. Ryo saw Rin blink away the reflected sunlight but she demanded to stay for the chores that needed the outdoors, the beating of their tatami, which they had to execute in a sort of panicked whirlwind, to avoid melted snow creating a risk of mildew, the washing in snowmelt of all Ryo's two cups and three plates, a quick scouting for wood for another pair of chopsticks so Rin wouldn't have to eat with her mother's.

They were busy all day in these tasks, all completed in the whirring machinery of a blizzard that allowed no room for speech. Breaths were knife-edged, sweat chilled like a slap of seawater on the skin.

She saw Rin from time to time through the birches, of a build and height like hers so that it was like coming upon a mirror by accident, propped and forgotten there in the steadily sleeting snow, or panes of glass interspersed through the charcoal-pencil trees.

Come nightfall, with no place to hang their robes to dry in the blizzard they had to light a kettle and string the robes from one corner of the tent to the other, on the diagonal, periodically murmuring to one another to keep sight of the fire. From through the canvas-colored cloth Ryo saw Rin's shadow move large and purple over the walls of her house, illuminating old crevices of familiarity, new unknowns. She'd braided her hair now and looked even less like the criminal she'd met at the port but Ryo realized watching her through the cloth that she had put her own armor on in cold mornings, ducking behind a sheet of cloth Meguro and Tanpopo had held from one end to another; she had no expectations for how someone outside the way things should be might look. 

"Would you please draw as close to me as you feel comfortable, for a moment!" she said, that evening, and when Rin came over, took her hand and prised the fingers apart to measure for her chopsticks. Rin took her own hand once when she was finished, examining the wound of her thumb, but when she realized the familiarity with which she'd done it she went scarlet. Then she retreated back to the other side of the clothesline, drawing it slightly to the side to watch Ryo set out her whittling knives and begin paring the sticks down.

"I've never had anything made for me," she said. "Fitted...to me. Have you always known how to do that?"

"No!" said Ryo. "Once I was a child. That was inefficient. I was certainly of no use to anyone."

Rin made an offended noise in her nose. Then she laughed, tentative.

"I'm sure you didn't even know how to use a knife."

"Extremely irresponsible!"

" _Irresponsible_!"

"Unthinkable!"

"Negligent!"

Suddenly the blade slipped into the kind of warp in the wood she'd been able to control for since she was six. Her hand had veered off balance without the thumb to steady it. She dropped the chopsticks with a clatter and Rin peered around the edge. Neither of them said anything for a moment when she saw the ruined chopstick. Then she said, in an odd high-pitched voice, "I _hardly_ think anyone could fault your competence now."

It was all nonsense. But Ryo understood the reinstitution of propriety for what it was, retrieved the chopsticks, situated her blade over one edge, and eased the knife into carving its long, spiraling shavings again.

Rin was talking. She'd picked up and hadn't even noticed it. "You know, Ryo, we just put water in the kettle and hung up these clothes, but we didn't remember to put something on the boil. My chopsticks will be done before my meal." She got up, shucking the robes aside. Already the pale face, the chalky patches under the eyes, the full, expressive mouth--all of it was becoming familiar. Ryo thought dimly that everyone who stayed the night became familiar; there had been so few and in a few days these details of this unknown girl would become more familiar to her than those of her own mother and father, which would recede, the blurred forms seen through winter trees in a blizzard.

She thought of it at a great distance, still not safe to approach. The missing sword guard, the pain in her wrist, her traitorous tongue that had still thrilled to the taste of the honey stick when they sat waiting like ferrygirls, and shellshocked by kindness accepted it. She was conscious of Rin hitching her robes out of the way, poking at the boxes of dried pulses and nuts.

"Do you think they'll truly send a runner for us?" she said, wrong-footed.

"Oh, yes," said Rin, hesitant. She'd felt it too then, that awareness of being the last people in the world. "Irresponsible, unthinkable, negligent," she was murmuring, singsong. "It's a wonder we managed so--well, out there, on our own."

It took her by surprise. "You think we did well?"

"Why--"

She'd startled herself, too; Ryo saw, the birdlike hands, twisting the edge of her sleeve, the tired eyes. Executioner's eyes in a girl's face like her own, the downstroke verdict: "Yes, I think. We really rather did."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She had made the sword guard herself, unscrewing the tang of her father's sword with care, managing the loosened pommel, negotiating the guard along the length of the blade so slowly it had taken her the better part of an evening to retrieve it, solder the opening into it for her chain, and then set it back in place. If it were still there, the metal would have had a new dent from Magatsu's knife. But it wasn't there and she had neither a guard for her sword nor a thumb to brace against it.

She lifted her sword and tried a set of crosswise sweeping drills, and then the vertical straight cut and halt that had been the hallmark of her father's sword school. Injuries in her legs sent up a dozen protests. The sword swerved unsteadily in her left hand and arced away from her right, pommel over tip, until it came to rest far away from her in the swirling snow.

She left it there that night in a pique that embarrassed her. In the early dawn she woke with Rin's hand laid cautiously on her hip, the girl's face frowning still in sleep, and realized she'd come to the wrong side of the hut. She put the crown of her head to the valley between Rin's shoulder and collarbone and insinuated herself closer. The hand on her hip came up, skimmed along her bicep, forearm, and elbow and held her hand between them, between their hearts. It was warm here, and densely quiet. A kettle hissed above their heads. Meters from where they lay, her sword had been retrieved and lay wrapped in a rag, drying near the mat where she should have been sleeping.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

What did yuki-onna wish for, from the people they met? They didn't request recognition nor require confirmation of their existence though it was them who were the ghosts. They asked only for travelers to forget their presence and leave them be in whatever icy glade they'd been found. There was also the story where the yuki-onna's conquest agreed to the condition of his own volition. He grew and married and came to adulthood as bit by bit he left the silent snow of the countryside, and then when he divided the burden of that old lost love with his wife she looked up, and in those sleet-grey eyes he recognized the spirit. He was frightened of her as he hadn't been of the snow, not since he was a child, not at her dissembling but the manner in which she'd fooled him, coming only in the guise of herself.

Rin wasn't afraid of snow, not quite, but of the solitude that swallowed up the hut that Ryo knew well from after her mother's death so that when she came back after leaving her alone there for an hour, Rin met her at a stumbling run, throwing her arms around her neck, but then into the warming skin of her throat discomfited her with a reversal of the sentiment. "Don't go out again, not when there may be-- _wolves_ , or goodness only knows what!" Ryo realized she hadn't been afraid but only worried for her, two sentiments she'd forgotten dovetailed together like the nonjoinable flip-sides of coins, and this only days past her father's death.

She was many other things. Tense and melancholy, but brittle in her silence, so she could study Ryo often with no restraint, gaze with such thick wonder at the walls of her house it was like a coat of new paint. Among other moral shortcomings she was a fretful sleeper, uneasy on her back, thrashing about so that it seemed inevitable those winglike shoulderblades would fracture or worse. She always behaved startled when the fat snowflakes landed on her eyelashes, her lips, as though there were anything else at all they could have done but fall.

She wasn't much of a housekeeper, really, but Ryo's wasn't much of a house. What she'd said was the truth of it: she liked things just so. And so they ate, they slept, they cleaned. Both of them would rather have had the semblance of these things than nothing at all. The chopsticks, with the warp that rendered them hardly better than an ungainly pair of tongs, were made to fit her hands, or her hands, it could also have been, were made to fit this, the first thing Ryo would make after the port. She remembered presenting them to her and then watching those first movements, polite, uncertain, then with no transition that she could see suddenly sure.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Why don't you fix it?" said Rin. "That missing guard on your sword."

"I lost it," said Ryo.

She hadn't intended it as an answer but Rin took it as one, and turned back to the millet she was pounding for a gruel. The part of hair between her braids was tender and pale and dispersed into the black like a tree in reverse. Many of these unexpected softnesses to her. Ryo put her hand on the back of her own neck, feeling the pulse there, assertion of the blood beneath. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

At an interlude in the snowfall on the fifth day, they snowshoed to the river to assess the crossing into Edo city proper, where a lonely skiff and pole was tethered and strained under the weight of snow. The errand runner would have difficulty with it. They packed herring into rice and checked one another's scarves pulled high over their noses.

The sun was eggwhite and milk, weak, a few platinum cloudbursts unraveling at its edges. They traded yuki-onna stories, only because the sun and the cloud cover were high enough that it wasn't at all frightening. They talked about the distance to the dojo in the city, the layers of dust Rin was afraid it had picked up, the empty house where Ryo would now never have occasion to go.

Ice floes dipped and sparred in the river, farther out a gloss of black ice, the dock furred with crystals, so that they held one another's elbows to inch out, and grew fretful, and skittered back.

They ate their fish and rice on the return, the air so cold and pure on their faces it tasted like nothing at all. The sight of the crossing had unbent something in them. They talked about another port. Grew fretful. Skittered back.

"I keep thinking of how he might have lived. If there was any way he might have been turned." Rin sighed into her scarf, and unwound it a little to breathe. "Turned from what, I truly don't know. He was really an extraordinarily aggravating person."

"It wouldn't have been him," said Ryo, thinking of Magatsu's long knife, stopped on the sword guard now lost. "Not if you have to ask that."

"That may be so."

"It _is_ so, I am quite confident, but then, my opinion should be of no interest to any decent personage."

"Well, when you put it like that, one _has_ to listen to it!" She swatted Ryo with her scarf. "How are you so wise anyway."

"How are you?" she said, with all honesty. She'd only intended to be polite and then midway through it became something else, and she couldn't snatch it back. Rin's clear eyes moved over her with a delicate, firm illumination, like a wide light.

Ryo bent down to adjust the straps on her snowshoe a little tighter for the last stretch of powder before the hut. A winter sunset streaked the sky between the trees, pale-bellied, the gentler tones striating down into a red that hurt her heart, for one reason or another. She thought of herself practicing under that reddened sky. When she was a child she'd done so innumerable times and been inflamed by it, believing it was surely the kind of landscape under which one could fall in love, embark upon an adventure or meet a yuki-onna or someone else, anyone, have an encounter that would change the course of a lonely life. Now that was all behind her, and it seemed unthinkable that the sky should be the same. It was only that which made her understand she was altered.

"Look at the red sunset," she said, to watch Rin's chin come up.

"Red!" Rin was staring at it with unalloyed misery. "Oh, Ryo. We don't even have red and green new year's robes."

"Not a one! Perhaps I shall have to escort you into town for them--only to buy them. Hardly for longer than that." She held her breath.

"Aren't I a criminal?"

"Well, certainly, but--you are only a normal girl, after all." She thought, and didn't say: you struggled with your laundry, you trouble yourself to sleep of nights, you're lacking for vernal robes, you fear silence and solitude, you couldn't help but notice how that honey candy tasted, you are no more, and no less of what I am--how shouldn't I know you, just as you came to me? 

"Oh, there's something I certainly haven't heard in a while! Not an--iconoclast, or a heroine, or an-- _inspiration_ , or a degenerate heiress, or...what have you."

"Why does it matter?" She checked herself. "Begging your pardon. But why does it matter?"

"Don't you know?" She saw Rin hold herself very still, hiding her bright eyes from view. This was a new idiom they'd entered, not needing to hear what they knew, but wanting to. Wanting. "You practice every night, you think I don't notice, but I do. You do know. That was what was taken from me."

That was like a woman who possessed legitimacy: to know the weight and shape of what had been taken, and of the entitlement. The first prerequisite of vengeance. In her life, Ryo had known it for her father, her mother, Lady Shima, Sakutaro--anyone else.

She shaded her eyes, though there was no need in the red-soaked sunset. She only wanted to pretend it was brighter than it was, as though there were many more hours left in the day.

"Of course you are a criminal and a normal girl," she said. "I see no particular contradictions therein. I am happy for you to live out your sentence at your own home, contemplating virtue..."

"And you, against my very pressing initial impressions to the contrary, are--a fool," said Rin impulsively, "and I won't set foot in Edo to buy robes without you. It's well, you know--for you not to be here alone."

This moment had been coming, she realized, since they'd met. She'd been waiting for it but it had fallen wrong just now. Rin hadn't asked her to stay; Ryo hadn't offered it. Even the husband of the snow woman had been more frank with her of what he wanted, for them to abandon their lives for one another, compromise some fundamental aspect of who they were but those were people who had come to one another already knowing what they wanted: a wife, the fealty of a mortal man. But Rin didn't belong to the part of her life when she'd known how to want something like that at all.

"I am afraid I shall not come," she said, her thoughts in tumult. "This is my home."

It was an overextension and it registered in her heart as though that muscle itself had been subject to the physical strain.  Rin set her hand in hers in apology and Ryo understood that she, too, was afraid. She murmured into her scarf,"Of course, of course."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The flaw in the yuki-onna story was that it was never ultimately clear whether the narrator or hero had seen the yuki-onna as a spirit that had taken on the role of his wife, or his wife who had divided some of her identity as a spirit. Her parents had never given any indication either way and on certain days standing in the hut waiting for water to boil, or lifting her sword like a heron's wing in the trees when the sun wouldn't spare her a shadow to spar against, she forgot why it should be a quandary at all. The yuki-onna hadn't had to be anything at all until someone else beheld her, until someone else needed to know who she was. 

There was no point in thinking whether a girl who should never have existed was only a normal girl who did extraordinary things, or an extraordinary girl who did normal things. Those distinctions were luxuries; they were for people who knew their place. If she wondered it now, it was only because she had been beheld, nothing more. And to want both--to believe in the possibility of both--that was unthinkable, the greatest luxury of all. No fare for the return crossing, that old place under a red sky where she could be free of the want for that luxury, but this too was a lie. She had a hand that could hold little any longer, she had a heart that held too much. She'd never been free of it at all.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Velveteen night, the blizzard dimmed to a startling silver shimmer. They could see stars when they peered outside through the snow and the sight made them oddly eager to go again and look, as though rationing glances, and then Rin with an expression of gravely condensed terror took a blanket and drew it about Ryo's shoulders, and they sat at the entrance of their hut, shivering, casting stubborn glances up at the firmament of glittering salt that couldn't help anyone, for anything, but that they craned their necks to now like the most important thing they'd seen.

They had a cup of tea between them; they hadn't noticed they'd only poured one. Ryo tried to take some of the liquid into her hand but Rin slapped it away and raised it to her lips instead. Their feet swung like they had in the cart.

They talked about things, and other things.

"I've never," confessed Rin. "Though once Manji _tried_ to get me to, but it--" she lowered her voice "tastes awful. I've never told anyone that before, but...I simply can't understand why anyone would drink shochu."

"It tastes like urine and plums," Ryo agreed, to which Rin turned mildly green and pushed the tea back at her. Her shoulder a warm half-moon against her own.

She'd never seen snow like this, hushed and sweet, silvery in the moonlight that looked wet, so luxurious it was with its load of liquid light. This was what Rin had done, thought Ryo, distant and a little helpless, made her own hut somewhere unrecognizable.

The tea in their cup dwindled; they talked. They talked.

"Anotsu Kagehisa was certainly virginal," Ryo found herself explaining. "He simply seemed possessed of a venereal disease. Nobody would indulge him."

Rin stared at her, slightly pink now. " _What_? I mean--o-oh. That's certainly a very interesting hypothesis. So who do you think..."

"The fiend, Otono-Tachibana Makie, had a very nicely established rear end--I noted this for her file--"

"I coincidentally also noted that...but of course, she was an...ahem--"

"But even _beyond_ that, Rin, can you not imagine."

"Ah, well. Yes. No! No, _not_ that I can imagine, but I see how one would...yes."

"Oh, and there is Magatsu-dono, of course! His sexual prowess is surely daunting, so he keeps his face covered....I suspect. Shameful I know, but it may be the only reason our torrid passion did not subsume the--"

"How can you possibly think _Magatsu--"_ Rin restrained herself. Then she said, with surprising vehemence, "Ryo, you have...terrible taste in men!"

The laughter startled out of her, she didn't mean it. She couldn't have meant it; it had never happened like this before. She simply couldn't keep from laughing. She hadn't practiced her sword yet that day, and yet here she was, with time to sit here like this and laugh. It was unthinkable.

She dried her eyes. She couldn't seem to stop doing it. After a while Rin joined her too, clutching her arm just under her bicep, wiping her eyes on her shoulder, just as though they were any gossipping ferrygirls after a hard day's crossing again. Like that it was easy to believe--the years, the night, all of it, the cruel and unthinkable wide world, only a crossing, but here was something they'd never seen before, a docking. A respite. The moment could have come and she'd have missed it, or failed to mind it.

She glanced down at Rin, still smiling, and then the smile shifted, as though some heat on her lips remained still from the tea they'd drank. Rin's pupils were blown wide in the dark, glass at their centers.

The door remained open when they finally huddled into their blankets, sending a starfall of sleet past their heads at a sharp slant. It was difficult to pay attention. One thing flowed easily from another. Hands, open palms, unbound hair, prickled goosebumps, skin. Rin had a focused, meticulous aspect to her even in the dark, her hands exploring Ryo's breasts. Her mouth moved uncertainly along the curve of one and then she dipped her head and sucked rather hard at the puckered nipple, eliciting an exclamation. "I'm sorry!" she cried. "I don't know why I did that. Oh, how embarrassing. Would you be--terribly sorry if I did it again?"

She would not, she attested. She let her do it again, the deliberation of it astonishing and delectable and then all at once overwhelming, the small tongue, the brush of Rin's bangs over her chest. She liked lifting her up by her arms so she could touch her in turn, her own hands eager, as though Rin had drawn out the nervousness for both of them.

"See, Ryo, how they fit in the palm of my hand! I--don't think it's at all decent."

"I am sure that is your own debauched mind at work! Imagine me, bedding such a notorious criminal. Suppose you allowed me to try that--"

"--I hadn't realized, it was very unegalitarian of me--of course, yes--"

"...Look at my poor fingers! Why, you are truly a reprobate!'

The river of snow, streaming an arm's width from them, bringing to mind all those celestial stories, women and gods dazedly afloat on currents of stars, the cold received on their skin as the sensation of a million humming, silver chimes.

"I never expected to find one of you," said Rin, all helpless, a little irritable, sweet in defiance of it. The tips of her fingers wet. It was so grave it became, immediately, the thing she would remember of all of it.

Ryo had done this before in happy-go-lucky fits and measures, but now there was the consciousness behind it that Rin would be here when she awoke again, something she had never had. It made her something grave and alien to herself, strange with this girl with whom she had begun to make a habit of speaking this way, in an inner voice that had never indulged such singularity of position--myself, yourself, me, you, me, self. And as she began to draw back in alarm of it Rin eased up on her elbows, needles of silver light glancing off her hair, and said, "--I've slept in a lot of people's rooms before, you know, but I've never--"

"I've done _this_ before," said Ryo, breathless. Impossible to say the other thing when it sounded so like asking.

There was a pause, but Rin kissed her then, cautious and open-hearted, the kind of kiss you gave when you didn't quite have the knack of it and thought only of your mouth with the rest all still as a board. Ryo could help her with that, and she did, winding her arms more deeply around Rin's waist until little by little she let her body come into the dips and hollows of Ryo's like water. Her thoughts ran like starstreams. The ice floes on the grey river had had form and solidity but were still filled with such softness that you knew they weren't ready to support the crossing, still full of that urge to fall against something and be broken sweetly upon it.

"Well," said Rin. "Wouldn't you know it? Even a couple of normal girls."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The next day the snowfall had stopped.

"Someone should come for us soon," said Ryo, from under the blanket. "Or we might die here, quite naked as pigs! How fanciful!"

Rin's sticky hair was in her eyes but she managed an unimpressed look. "Then we shouldn't waste time, I rather think--" She squeaked aloud at her own temerity.

What they could see of the sunlit woods rolled like milk. Full to their lit brims with a ringing quiet that that held apart, that was held, that held in turn.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They parceled and divided what they knew, as they'd done with the house, glanced fussily at one another's knowledge and traded the pieces here and there. The sound of the kettle clattering could drive them to look at one another, startled, and then ricochet away to opposite sides of the room. In five minutes they'd come together again without a touch of unease, the kettle hissing away as they sought each other's mouths and shucked the robes cleanly from one another's shoulders.

Ryo liked kissing and had acquired a workmanlike proficiency in it in a variety of circumstances over the years, sleepy-limbed in haystacks, at festivals under tables, across the counter of her charcoal stall when she'd been conscripted into one of the transactional, frank little flirtations of life in the city's underbelly. This was nothing like that. Rin didn't like kissing and found it alarming when she couldn't shoot a flurry of nervous, suspicious glances at her partner, went stiff when Ryo discovered her open eyes and broke away to shout at her until Rin crept sullenly back into her arms and made it up to her, with a calculatedness to the act of kissing her throat that was somehow more indecent than abandon.

But she liked kisses where she could see them easily, on the tops of her thighs and low on her stomach below a seamed scar. She liked even the most tangential attention to the sensitive bud around her clit so much it made her throw her hands over her face, but demureness and its auxiliaries were a poor fit for her; even as her hips battered off the mat for Ryo's tongue Ryo could glance up and see her gazing down at her, a little fascinatedly appalled by the entire endeavor but always curious. Her orgasms were contained and obvious, strong flushes along her breasts or upper arms that she clutched at with her hands as though mosquito bites. She gave the impression of a picnicker inevitably exasperated by the wilderness but unable to resist being outdoors, and it allowed Ryo in turn to identify with sundry elements of the wild landscape she'd held apart from herself all this time. A swordswoman who couldn't--a girl who couldn't, a body that betrayed her for any of it--but here she was a force of nature. Who knew! Rin moved, under her fingers, like some soft being held with absolute trust by the threads of the world. Ryo could have been the red sky, the starry trails of snow, the nudging ice floes, or perhaps only herself. Perhaps all of them. Who knew.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Such longing. She couldn't have imagined it of herself. When she drew away to practice that night Rin's other hand was firm, fitted over wrist and palm and finally the wound of her missing thumb. With purpose she pressed into it hard enough that it elicited a gasp of pain, and stopped Ryo short.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but Ryo..."

The moment Ryo heard her voice she knew she was ready to ask, properly now. No sword guard, no way to hold to her last means of defense and she was vulnerable now, in the house she mightn't have been able to face again if not for this girl. There were feet of piled drifts outside her doorstep, a river running wild under feet that had walked upon the ice with trust, and she hadn't been cautious enough at all to prevent this. She'd been for these days the sort of happy, unconstrained ferrygirl who could go back and forth with ease across the river but that was not who she was; she was a woodcutter and she would die here in her woods, because she had lived in them and Rin should have known that.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "Leave it be--"

"The city--if you'd only listen--"

" _No_!"

But even as she stumbled blindly out into the dark she knew her own treacherous fingers had grasped Rin's thumb as though it were her own body. Her own heart, restored to her, tricked like the husband of the old yuki-onna into accepting, under the guise of only herself, something already of his own life.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

On the eighth day, they made it to the river crossing to find the black water flowing damningly underneath it. Ryo had known since she'd heard it, and then she'd been able to smell it. The scent of running water was different than ice. Rin hadn't been able to tell at all. It came upon her like a surprise, the idea of her own homecoming. Ryo was watching for that, too. 

She came to Ryo and kissed her once on her temple and then on her mouth, as though laying a signature at the end of a writ. Something protested in her at that, nothing particularly new. A forceful leaping towards Rin that made her draw back if only to counteract it. Rin sensed it too and held her elbows tensely for a moment before moving away.

She looked like a blackbird at the riverbank. Nervous, alight. Liable any moment to disengage from the earth.

"The crossing, it's--"

"It is ready," said Ryo. "I will take you home whenever you'd like it, if no one should come for us."

"And stay to buy our robes together, of course. I'll venture a guess you don't know a _thing_ about color matching, it'll be _my_ turn to show you how very lovely you are."

It was the imperiousness of her voice that did it. If she'd sounded wistful Ryo might have faltered, but here it was, the dissembling she hated about her, as though she'd already forgotten the urgency with which she'd asked her the same in the night, now an assumption and not a request. Rin was already slipping back into the tones of her own place, and that place was still ahead of her. She didn't have to practice of nights anymore to keep anything alive. She had only to make a crossing.

"No thank you," said Ryo. "I shall not be coming with you. I trust--you'll be able to manage yourself on the other side."

"What are you talking about? You have to keep me under house arrest, don't you?"

She was lifting her hair off her neck, already pulling it through her fingers as though she might braid it. It was terrible, how the light on it was unchanged and still elicited the same hopeless desire from Ryo, even as she knew what was happening. 

"I am not going to Edo," said Ryo, "and I don't prefer to watch you under house arrest, not in your house. I shall make inquiries if Meguro or Tanpopo might be able to assist, but for my part, I cannot--do what you want of me."

"What I _want_ of you?"

She'd spun, all her long and heavy hair flaring about her. The river surged past her with a roar that Ryo realized was in her own ears. "I don't want anything of you. How could you possibly think--"

"You don't say that because you don't want anything of me." She took a step back in her own consternation. The thundering ice in the water. It had sunk after all, it'd subsumed itself like everything else the woods ate up with no mercy. "You say it because you are proud of not wanting anything, now that what was taken from you has been--returned, or...given away freely, to that man--"

"Ryo, how _dare_ you!"

"How dare _you_?" she cried. "How dare you try to fool me this way? You want me to go with you for ever and ever, you won't ask straight, but how could you _think_ I _\--_ how could you think _I_ wouldn't hear it?"

Rin had drawn herself up to her full height, pulling her sleeve out and letting it fall. "How ever would you know that? You talk to _me_ about honesty--you can't even look at your own poor hand, and you won't even make a new sword guard for that awful relic--how I wish I'd never met you and your stupid _obstinacy_! How ever would _you_ know what I want?"

"Because I want the same--" The phrase came back to her with sickening speed. "I never expected to find one of you! I _want_ to go with you," shouted Ryo, "what do you think? I have practiced my sword every day of my life, and with you I forget why I should any longer, or what I wanted to do it for! I was someone before you! I was someone who could regain what was lost to her, who was happy alone! You took away all of that, and I was never wrong about you, not for a moment, you are a _thief and a liar_ , to take that from me! You are a _criminal_!" 

She understood in that moment that Rin had loved her for seeing her so clearly and had never anticipated that such a feeling might be turned back in upon itself. As she realized it, she did not look very much like a criminal at all. Red, chapped skin, nervous hands, her hair tangled from days in the isolation of the blizzard. The yuki-onna of her nights and now all the winters to come was in the light of her leaving not a demon, not a thief. Only a normal girl. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She didn't go outside the hut to practice that night but snatched up her sword and pushed past the piles of snow until she reached the river, and then against the backdrop of the crossing she went with savage intention into her forms. As her swordstroke cut the air she thought of herself slicing out her own heart. This was all she had now, all she would have again, what she could take for herself of her own home and nothing more again. She'd gone out into the world and returned with love, and all it had done for her was show her the smallness and meanness of the place where she'd become herself. She was sick with it. This was the truth of those old stories, then, no returning, no satisfaction with an ordinary life. You saw the demon, you loved her even, but worse you saw yourself.

Nerves screamed from every part of her body and she longed for the blanketing numbness of snowfall again but it was as though her body had remembered now what living was, with Rin's touch, and opened once more the floodgates of pain. She cried, pressing snow to her knees and thighs, and then she saw the river in front of her and thought of shorting out all the nerves so that she could only lift the sword one more time. She snatched it to her. She flew down the slope of the bank.

A cold she couldn't have imagined scintillated through her, followed by relief. She heard a shout and the sounds of someone splashing into the water from the opposite bank. Her head swum. In the welcome disorienting nausea she thought of Rin, as she thought tenderness would compel her to do now always, and collapsed into the water.

 

 

 

 

 

~ 

 

 

 

 

 

When she came to it was to a scent from her childhood--rice gruel with pickled cuttlefish. She sat bolt upright and stared at the cup of it next to her. The ground was covered with a charcoal-colored fire-blanket. She could hear a fire going somewhere above her left ear.

She was propped against a warm shoulder she recognized immediately. She turned, suddenly overcome by relief, and settled into the threadbare blue clothes with a savage sense of reclamation.

"Can we not make a tradition out of you dying on me, or trying," said Magatsu in a strangled voice. "Seriously, this is like the third time--h-hey! Oh, come on."

She'd clutched at his mask and pulled it down over his chin. "Isn't that a little familiar?" But he wrapped his arms around her all the same, the old fastidious completeness with which he'd done it on the ride to Mito, for a moment pulling her very close. She realized he hadn't known she'd survived.

They sat there, drowsy and stunned. She watched the heat above the fire bend the river to a soft cascade like hair. She fidgeted with a jute cord snaking under his collar until he grew self-conscious and batted her hand away. His fingers, like Rin's had, cupped the wound of her thumb in a truly infuriating manner. "What's the matter, woman, not going to accuse me of shirking some duties in order to sit around contracting hypothermia with you? Or you don't--" his voice faltered-- "d'you remember who I am?"

"Magatsu-dono, of course I assume you are shirking some manner of duties," said Ryo, irritated. "I simply did not say anything due to maidenly gratitude. If you would not mind, will you either put your hand on my right breast, making sure to cover it for heat retention, or turn me closer towards the fire?" He turned her closer towards the fire. "Thank you, only it is quite unwieldy and its wound takes the chill fiercely. Whatever are you doing here?"

"I'm just a runner--this blonde at a flophouse sent me with a cart, thought you might want to take the street instead of the crossing and said she had a pair o'girls holed up in a hut somewhere around the southeastern city limits. Anytime I hear something that batshit I assume it's gotta be Rin, picked up some clothes and knives for her or I'd have been here yesterday, didn't know the other. Shoulda known it'd be you too, but I haven't seen that kind of luck in a while."

He was clearly delirious. She wondered if he was unduly sensitive to cold water. Before she could pursue this line of thought he pressed the bowl of gruel and fish upon her and she fell silent for a few minutes so she could eat. She could tell she made him talkative and she liked that about him, that he wasn't naturally, and that there were skips and halts in his stories that spoke of how embarrassed he was but the urge to talk anyway subsumed it. He couldn't trick her; he couldn't even try. She stared at him openly with no need to ration herself and listened to him go on about the blizzard prices of charcoal in Edo proper, the likelihood of an eggplant crop come spring, nonsense details of the wayhouses along the ride back from Mito that were only interesting because they'd been hoarded as though for her specifically. Then he took some of her gruel and said, "So, what were you doing in the water anyway?"

"Practicing my sword."

"I...okay."

"Do not say anything to me!"

"Do I look like I'm saying anything to you?! I don't care what you do! Finish your gruel and spread your legs out for a second, circulation should be back by now...there ya go," the gentleness in his voice, sudden and almost speaking to himself, like Rin's. Her eyes filled and she ducked her head angrily. Magatsu stabbed at the fire with equanimity and pretended to ignore the tears sopping onto his chest.    

"I had to practice," she said. "I have been shirking it, and I...Rin wanted me to go to Edo, and I wanted to go. I wanted to leave this behind, all I've ever built or done--when I was less than nothing." He didn't say anything. "Aren't you going to ask me why I didn't go?"

"Wouldn't be you if you went," he said absently.

Of all things, she hadn't expected the answer she wanted, the answer she realized, remembering, that she had given. "I do not think so."

"But you'll regret if you don't go, that's true too. We've all got--a lot of selves to betray."

"Magatsu-dono, shame on you!" She thrashed about in his arms to slap the back of his head, and nearly overturned them both. "You have grown exceedingly metaphysical in my absence. It is a disgrace and inappropriate for men and women of our station."

"Right, like _you_ care so much about our--look. Look, you. It's not a bad thing to be stopped short. You might find you kind of li...li...tolerate...it."

She thought of Rin--iconoclast, heroine, inspiration, heiress, criminal. The firelight seemed suddenly too close to her skin. She could still feel the river pressing past them into the northern forests. It was too much still to be there, at the crossing; she wished he'd taken her back to her hut.

"How would you know I'll regret it?"

"The ships--at--I..." He left off, uneasy, and moved the cloth at her shoulder through his fingers. A tense shifting and turning like the coals, dimmed low, the threads of light like ore in them. "Maybe you should get used to the idea there are people who might know you, now."

"What a forward thing to say!"

"W-what? Well--let it be, then. You're my...student...or whatever."

She laughed then, in spite of herself. It was difficult not to be delighted getting what you'd asked for; she was learning that. "You submitted to it, then!"

He smiled against the top of her head, or he didn't, he remained grave. It had only felt like he had.

"What you said, it came true," he said. "Next life for both of us."

Before he left her there he helped her wheel the cart up her side of the bank, and reassured her to her satisfaction that he knew how to pole the flat skiff tethered to the crossing dock. His clothes held the fire's heat like planes of mineral or onyx, the ruddy heat of charcoal that she knew well, and with her eyes shut could predict the shape and nature of the dormant flame: high like a signal-flare, or stuttering, or burn-for-hours constant. She used to be a person who could discern potentials that way.

When he turned, he looked at her with a sort of cautious, conditional happiness. She folded her arms against the surprise of its reciprocation and watched him recede back towards the city, gliding on a surface that seemed now eased to black glass. Then, halfway down the bank, he clapped a hand to the back of his neck and swore. 

"Say," he called, shading his eyes and looking suddenly quite young, all spiky energy, like any errand boy. "Forgot--catch!"

He tugged the jute cord from around his neck, tangling it in his fingers to make a ball, and tossed it to her buoyantly overhand. She clapped her palms on it and spread them: threaded onto the necklace, the same down to the dent that had stopped him short, was her sword guard.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"I don't have any intention of speaking to you whatsoever," said Rin primly, so Ryo said nothing, only did what she used to with her father and dropped her things by the door, curled around Rin's waist like a nautilus, and put her head in her lap. It had the same effect, although she was sure Rin would have been horrified to hear it. Fingers in her hair, as though she was something lovely that couldn't help but invite the touch. She closed her eyes and smelled the scent of her weak soap on the folds of one of Rin's two robes.

There was a little cookfire here too, the underwarm and apprehensive sort Rin liked to set, but it was warm enough, with the both of them wound up like this. They sat, and waited for one another.

Ryo said, "I very much regret my impetuous behavior!"

"Yes, well, you _should_!" sniffed Rin. "I have never invited anyone to live with me before and I should certainly grow disillusioned with it if that is the response I can expect."

Her voice had such a plaintive indignity to it. Ryo kissed her stomach, through the layers of clothing. Rin gathered her torso up so she was lying along her arm, and dipped her head to be kissed properly. It was a slow kiss, close-mouthed. She wasn't good at it this way. She bumped her nose, and felt the points of Rin's little teeth. "Do you rescind your offer then, for my ingratitude?"

"No," said Rin, immediate. "I don't _care_ about your _ingratitude_ , and you know I would want you to stay in your home, if you could, but I--I should have made a clear offer of it, and realized you were also--afraid." She reached beneath the opening of her robe and stroked her sternum, the top of her breast, her warm stomach until Ryo took the robe off entirely, so she could touch as she wanted, now that she'd grown so much easier with her want. "I can say it for the both of us, if you can't."

"I don't care a bit if you're afraid. It suits a lawless criminal well to do whatever she so pleases."

"Then be afraid with me," said Rin with all her irritable petulance, "be--upset, and joyful, a gossip, a swordswoman, a dear fool, all of it, with me," and it was right, this time, the moment. This was what the man had felt when the yuki-onna had revealed herself to him and spared him from death even as he proved his knowledge of her her, a gratitude that had the weight and profusion of snowfall, the unification of all the multiplicities of his life and his desires into the being of a ghost and a living woman both. They kissed for the last tme, in Ryo's own home, and her fingers curled about Rin's thumb as though she would never let go. As though with this support she might pick up or open or hold whatever she wished again, for all the days of her life.

The surety of her girlhood was returned to her, conditional, to be sure for them both. In that moment, it was a greater feeling than being only herself.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Neither of them knew how to pull a cart.

"I suppose we'll figure it out," said Rin, fretful as usual. Her hair was back in its braids and she'd hit Ryo in the nose with a medicine ring when she'd leaned over to kiss her.

Ryo wore an obi, as she had when her hair had been cut so many years ago. Her fingers were greasy from the axles of the wheels and the oil she'd used liberally on them. She cut a harness for them both to pull it like mules and they had a fight when Rin refused to be seen wearing it but it was easy enough to wheel the cart carefully, one of them stamping down the snow ahead with shoes a a little at a time to make a trail. The wind of winter came hollow into the space but the trees gave it a whistle, so that it left even that empty place with the sound of a flute.

The red sunset touched their robes, staining them with the light and shadow, red and green, each apiece.

It wasn't a long road to Edo, even with the possessions in their cart. They talked about dusting, and whether it was something that might be put off for a day or so. They talked about a mutual trepidation of spiders. They talked about buying a bit of shochu once they reached town to quell said trepidation, and then they talked about things other than housekeeping, the road, the trees, the sun, the snowfall, the ice, the river, memories, fingers, swords, criminals, girls. They set the cart down to bundle into it and lay their cold palms against one another's skin. The snowy endlessness of the woods now numbered ahead of them, the world filled by the sound of their voices. They were both laughing, their mouths open. Breaths gathering and dispersing like sobs into the dense, shell-shocked air.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the end


End file.
